Thread Subject: Teleconference 01/10/07

From: Brett, Thomas F
Date: Thu, Jan 11 2007 6:30 AM

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I have copied the following from the transcript of yesterday's
teleconference:

" ... but it seems the Citrex issue it's complicated around the service
environment for the agency that is providing the shared service
available but the customer may not be the same level so they may not
even be able to install a compatible application on the client
workstation so the work around is still going to go back to if an agency
cannot completely comply..."

Providing a reasonable accommodation to allow a person with disabilities
to perform at the same level as a person who is not disabled is not
readily achievable in the Citrix environment and the result are not
totally satisfactory. A significant portion of AT will not work in this
set up. Most AT is designed to operate in a local state with access to
all the native windows features. Screen magnifiers, screen readers,
speech to text and alternative pointing devices won't work out of the
box on an individual's local PC while accessing the agency's shared
network.

While we have successfully demonstrated that AT can work for some screen
reader products, we have found that installation and maintenance of the
server screen reader software to be difficult and would not always work.
As I understand the Citrix Farm set up, when a user signs into thru
Citrix they may or may not be using the server that has the software
resident on it. To insure that the user can access the server the
LSFORCEHOST command is used to force the user's pc to the server that
has the server software. This is done not only to allow the user to
access the server side software but also to insure that the user obtains
the licensing for the software. Once connected I have found that not
all of the keyboard commands are the same and the speech is slow which
will affect the ability to perform at a satisfactory level. An employee
can use dial-up or broadband to gain access thru Citrix and results are
not the same.

I am not aware of any screen magnification & speech AT that work in the
Citrix environment.

Using the VPN only to connect instead of Citrix is one solution to the
accessibility issue with Citrix. This, however, requires that all of
the agency desktop applications also be on the local work station. If
the agency uses Microsoft Office, local application, terminal emulator
for mainframe, etc, the same products will need to be installed locally.
Using this process will all AT to access the native windows features.
Since all of the applications and the AT are resident locally, the
screen reader, screen magnifier with speech and speech to text
technology will work as normal. The user would need to map the agency
data drives to the local PC so they would have be able to update and
browse their information.

Using the VPN only connection is something that I have only recently
been testing. Using broadband connections allow me to process data as
if I were at the office. However there is a significant delay using
dial up connectivity.

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